Log trains

Kronospan is the UK's leading manufacturer of high quality wood-based panels for which the raw material is logs, harvested from suitable forests around Great Britain. Several of these are in Devon and Cornwall and in late 2011 the Heathfield branch near Newton Abbot - the truncated former line to Moretonhampstead - was reopened and a log loading point established at Teigngrace. Here the logs could be transferred from road to rail and onward carriage to the Kronospan factory at Chirk in North Wales. Log trains ran intermittently until in early 2015 the operation was transferred to the allegedly more convenient Riverside Yard in Exeter from where the trains still operate from time to time. This gallery is intended to give an impression of some of this traffic, particularly of the locomotive run round operation at Newton Abbot which was necessary there to gain access to the Heathfield branch.